Forged by Battle (WarVerse Book 1) (6 page)

Interlude

Ele

Fire and heat raged around her. Branches cracked and fell, battering her with blazing gusts of heat and noise; trunks splintered and trees that had stood for a millennium bent to the unwavering heat. Each lungful she pulled in was more smoke than air, though she did not cough or lack for breath. The flames that licked her skin left no burns, and the torrents of heat that buffeted her did not so much as singe her hair.

Her entire mind was consumed with an anger that burned hotter than the forest. Fragmented and confusing thoughts struggled to be heard over the fire and her screams. Pain, hatred, anger, a swirling torrent of emotions and thoughts. She did not know who she was, how she had come to be in the forest, or why the fires left her skin unhurt.

She was barefoot, though as she ran through the trees, she did not feel the heat of the fallen embers. Each unseen rock cut into the soles of her feet, but there was no pain. Why was there no pain?

Everything ahead of her was flickering red and yellow. The fire had no end. Though her memory supplied nothing of where she had been, she knew it could not always have been that way. Slivers of images tried to rise from the fog of her thoughts. Warm fluid surrounding her, her hands pressed against a window. Muddied faces looking at her, and indistinct voices.

Then those memories were gone, replaced with the pain of needles lancing into her neck, back, arms. Lights flashed endlessly, and waves of sound made her sick. Anger clouded her mind again.

Around her, the fire exploded with intensity. Several trees erupted from the heat alone, sending splinters whistling out, and trailing cuts into arm and side. Trickles of multicolored blood oozed from wounds flickering red and yellow in the light. Still, she felt no pain.

The blood sizzled and smoked on her skin, and disappeared before her eyes in the impossible heat. The splinters ignited, and when they burned away, her skin was unbroken.

Again, she screamed. Why? Why was she unburnt? Who was she? Fear started to take form, replacing the anger. Her tears sizzled and dried on her cheeks.

A new sound hit her—a screaming louder than the roar of the fire and the snapping of falling trees. She looked around, then up, and saw a blazing trail as something fell from the sky.

She ran after it. Whatever was falling would crash down somewhere nearby, somewhere in the fire.

It took her much longer than she expected to reach where she thought it would land. Though her muscles never tired, and her lungs never hurt for air, it was harrowing to run through endless fire and smoke with only her anger and fear as distraction.

When she finally broke from the trees, it was not some falling savior that she found, but a vast blue lake.

The water felt cool somehow, though she was unable to feel the heat outside. She dove under the surface to escape. Bubbles erupted from all around her, the water coming to a boil as it touched her skin. Before long, she was blind beneath the churning waves. Memories of being trapped under water assaulted her mind, and the boiling water around her flashed into steam. She screamed and screamed against memories she did not understand, and when she opened her eyes, she was sitting at the bottom of an empty lake, all the water boiled away, with a large metal ship stuck into the ground across from her.

She had found the falling object. A hiss came from the ship, and a seam appeared as the top half of it cracked open. A helmeted figure pushed his way out, his body covered in a skin-tight purple uniform. He started to approach her.

"No!" she screamed. All the anger had boiled away with the lake, and only fear remained. She was sure she would kill the man, and then she would be trapped in the burning forest forever.

He kept approaching, his hands raised in front of him. He was saying something, but she couldn't hear him through the helmet.

He was only feet from her when she screamed again, "Don't, I don't want to hurt you."

He pulled the helmet from his head. A young man with deep blue eyes and a head of short cut brown hair. She recognized him. But how?

"Please," she begged as he came close enough to touch.

He dropped his helmet to the ground and knelt. "It'll be okay," he told her, then reached out to touch her arm.

His fingers touched her skin, and nothing happened. He was unburnt.

She collapsed into his arms.

Part 2

Chapter 12

Vincent

Vincent's worry that he would be trapped under the lake evaporated, along with all the water pinning his fighter down. He had not expected his entry to put off as much heat as it did, but between shooting through the upper atmosphere and the heat of his engines he supposed it would be enough. His computer screamed a warning at him as the lake started heating. It was slow at first—he didn't even notice it for a few minutes after landing. Then the water bubbled all around him and flashed into steam. Before he knew it, he was sitting at the bottom of a dried-out lakebed.

The way he had sunk left him with his nose in the air and a good view on nothing but the sky, so Vincent unlatched his restraints and pushed himself up to try and get a better look.

"Is that a girl?" He gaped at what appeared to be the figure of a young woman across the lakebed. He must have been seeing things. "Rover, how hot is it out there?" he asked, blinking.

"Ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, thirty-six Celsius, three hundred and nine Kelvin..." The little bot droned.

"Alright, enough. I can pop the hatch?"

"Affirmative, sir."

Vincent reached down for the control, but hesitated before he pressed it down. What in the void was a girl doing in the middle of the jungle, and how hadn't she been killed by the fire? Vincent, like most of the fleet, had learned to be wary of things he didn't understand. It could be some kind of magical trap, though he hadn't heard any reports of portals this far out in fringe space.

"Rover, scan out a hundred meters, full frequency," Vincent ordered, waiting tensely for the reply.

"One life form detected, human," Rover answered, and Vincent didn't waste any more time. As soon as the cockpit was open he vaulted out, landing in a crouch on the dried lakebed below. It wasn't even wet. His ship had been burning hotter than he thought, or the lake was smaller than he thought he had seen. Thank the gnomes for good life support.

Vincent wasn't halfway to the girl when she called out.

"No!" she screamed, and Vincent saw immediately how terrified she was. She was young, maybe twenty standard years old, with long red hair that stuck to her in clumps. She was wearing what looked like a jumpsuit—orange with black lettering—only it was burnt off to the point that she was almost naked.

"It's okay, I'm here to help," he called, but she clearly didn't understand. He tapped the control on the side of his helmet to separate it from the nano-suit, then lifted his hands so she could see he had no weapons.

"Please." Her eyes were so wide he could only see the whites. Soot stained her olive-colored skin. She twisted her arms around herself and shook.

"It'll be okay," he told her, and then he reached out to touch her shoulder, to let her know he wasn't a threat. She collapsed.

Vincent lunged to catch her, just barely keeping her head from striking the ground. She was really pretty up close. The kind of girl he might look for if he ever made it home. He pushed her hair back behind her ear. They were round, Human. Thank god.

"Rover!" he shouted. "Med kit, now!"

The little bot scuttled off the ship and towards him, exchanging its tail and foreclaws for basic medical tools. As soon as it was close, it squatted low and played a beam from its sensor array across the girl. Its tail shot forward, stopping just short of the bend in the girl’s elbow, and then a needle deployed and pressed into her flesh.

"What's that?" Vincent asked.

"Battlefield antibiotic, painkiller, and sedative to keep her comfortable until rescue." A compartment opened at the rear of the droid’s shell. It dipped its tail, and with a small set of graspers, pulled out a square of silver cloth. "Emergency blanket."

Vincent rested the girl’s head on his knee as he pulled open the thin blanket and wrapped it around her. It felt like foil, only less prone to ripping, and reminded him of the kind of heating blankets he and his father would use when they went camping in the mountains. Human tech.

"Is the emergency transponder activated?" Vincent asked.

"Roger, sir," Rover answered, as did the AMI chip. Vincent grunted in reply.

"I need to get her back to the ship," he told no one in particular. She was not difficult to carry, and he got her to the ship without issue. Once he was close, he allowed Rover to climb the side and latch itself on. With its clamps turned to the side, the bot lifted the girl up and over while Vincent climbed up himself. Together they managed to seat her in the cockpit.

Vincent nodded and dropped down to sit on the edge of the cockpit’s opening. The ship rocked dangerously with his weight. He made sure not to make any more sudden moves.

"Rover, go find some rocks or something and make sure our ship doesn't fall over. Try not to scratch the paint," he said as he looked over at the armor plating still flash-welded to the frame. While the rest of the heavy payload package was scattered around the planet somewhere, the emergency repair Rover had made in orbit had stuck.

The droid barked and the dog hologram shimmered back in place before it set off to comply.

"She must have been using the lake for shelter when the fires broke out," he mused, looking back to where he had found the girl. The fires around him had started to burn themselves out. Blackened husks of trees stood where a forest had once been, and smoke overpowered any other scent.
Funny. No matter how big, it always smells like a campfire.

Vincent glanced back down at the unconscious girl. She looked peaceful now; the fear that had been twisting her features was gone, replaced by the dreamless nothing of medicated sleep. His eyes fell to her slow-rising chest, which was exposed under the poorly situated survival blanket. He twisted his head, admonishing himself for looking, but a scrap of orange cloth caught his eye again. The black lettering he had noticed over her left breast was still intact enough to read. He reached down and pulled the blanket over enough to see the whole word.

ELE
,
all in block lettering, with a string of numbers beneath. Vincent pulled the blanket over to cover the lettering and any of the girl’s exposed skin.

"What in the void were they doing on this planet?"

Chapter 13

The Exile

Once the Shadow's energy ran out and it returned to the blade, it was simple for the Exile to finish her deception. Before she detonated the rear of the ship, she moved through and ensured that every passenger was secured against the sudden decompression, and as she did, she touched each of them and erased their memories of her. The ones who had been injured during her fight were still alive, and with a little basic first aid, she was able to keep them stable. Once finished, she slipped into one of the cargo hatches and blew the charge.

When the rescue crews arrived, they found a compartment full of unconscious but alive civilians, and with the damage to the shuttle's engines, there was no time to waste looking at blood trails or camera feeds. The Exile slipped past the rescue crews unnoticed, her Web causing them to forget about her if they looked. None of them were searching for someone hiding, though; they were too preoccupied with rescuing everyone aboard. She made it to one of the Fleet ships with no one even aware of her existence, and from there, she was just another body in a crew of hundreds.

She was still an alien to them, however, and even if there were a thousand sailors aboard she would stand out as a blue-skinned “nymph.” But something was off, and when the rescue tug landed on the flight deck, her Web detected something she did not expect. Others—others of her kind. What were they doing on a human ship? They were allies to humans, yes, but her people kept to themselves, and the humans did the same. But there they were, as bright as spotlights in her Web. Her infiltration suddenly became that much more difficult. Humans she could trick, or hide from, but not one of her own.

Enemy mistakes are allied opportunities.
The mantra sprang unbidden to her thoughts. A lifetime of training took more than banishment to remove. The ship was a mixed compliment, and that meant she would go unnoticed among the humans while hiding herself in the Web from the others. As long as none of them spotted her and saw the mark of the Exile on her, then she would have time to plan.

The first step was to gather intel, to find out what she could about the “Condemned.” Where they were located, and what their mission was. The next step was to find them. A platoon of special ops soldiers would be a powerful tool in her mission.

Although… she did not really have a mission anymore. She was banished from her path, and the ideals she had trained for her entire life had been stripped from her. She was a completely free agent, stripped of her rank, her influence, and even her name. She had no obligation to continue.

She could steal a ship, take as many supplies as she needed, and leave human-controlled space. Everything she had done was for her people, and they had taken everything from her. The Exile ran her hand over the hilt of the dagger she lost everything for. She knew she needed power to combat power, and if she was to prevent what was coming, she needed every advantage. The Shadow and his ilk from beyond the portals were nothing compared to what destroyed her homeworld.

No, she had to continue.

The Exile found herself on a large hangar deck hidden from view by the numerous boxes and machinery that littered the space. She held her Web as close as she could, not wanting to draw her Shell, but knowing that any active pulse would alert other Psykin of her location. The Exile slinked across the bay, moving between shadows to keep out of sight, all the while watching the various crew members as they came and went, mentally mapping out the different routes in and out of the bay.

Intel gathering was simple: watch everyone, memorize patterns. An unsecured computer would allow her to find out more about the Condemned. If that man from the shuttle was moving from Bastogne to the fleet, then they must be either stationed on one of the ships or within a jump of the system. Before she found them, however, she would find resources. Weapons, uniforms, equipment. She was going to impersonate a Special Forces lieutenant, and she would need to look the part.

The Exile felt the analytical calm that took over whenever she set herself to a goal. The constant undercurrent of anger and betrayal was pushed aside for the details she needed to take in.

She could continue her search for the project Rebirth.